Deluxe Paint IV on the Amiga is legendary.

Bryce 3D was a lot of fun on Windows 95.

Could you be thinking of KidPix? That had some pretty wild patterns and fun colors and stamps etc.

The oldest graphics programs I remember using are the classic PBRUSH.EXE on Windows 3. Just seeing the interface brings me back to all the silly drawings I made. We also had disks for The Print Shop Deluxe. I remember printing out some of the stock graphics on our dot matrix printer and thinking it was so cool. Especially liked the palm tree graphics.

Years later my friend introduced me to Photoshop 7.0 and gave me a crash course in using it. I kept developing those skills into high school and even today I still occasionally use Photoshop for editing and creative work.

I used the XP and 7 versions of Paint a ton. I have strong muscle memory for PrtSc > Win > Paint > Ctrl+V > Ctrl+S to quickly save screenshots long before Ctrl+Shift+S snipping tool came around with Windows 10. I still think using Paint is superior in a lot of ways - it doesn't mess with scaling the image and lets you quickly highlight items or resize for email or chat or whatever.

Windows 11 Paint is still mostly the same, but seems a little slower and less intuitive. One can still get "Classic Paint" for Windows 11 and I think it's super handy to have in the context menu for quick edits.

No real nostalgia but then I'm not that creative!

I do have nostalgia for old enterprise server software though, things like Exchange, backup software, etc ...guess what I do for a living 😉
Also old browsers always install the final supported version of IE and Netscape 3 on Windows 3 and Netscape 4 on 9x not that I ever use them.

I still use Paint Shop Pro 5 not out of this 'nostalgia' thing but it's a fast-loading still-practical useful image program that has a comfortable way to work with palettes and alpha channels. It's more out of habit and not desiring bloat than "rember good old day". Only real issue is a weird selection-related memory leak and the imprecise smudge tools. And unlike Photoshop, the company doesn't gaslight you as an illegal old-versions-user for not exclusively keeping up with their live service. 😀

Paint Shop Pro 4 had a major interface change that had shrunk the toolbars, 3's had painting tools and resembled closer to Zsoft PC Paintbrush for Windows.

NeoPaint's also had a Windows version but it never grew out of its 1994 limitations and tools (and rolled that way until NeoSoft sold out around 2018)

Autodesk had Animator and Animator Pro which I used a fair bit when I moved from the Amiga to a DOS PC. I also used Imagine 4.0 and 3D Studio R4. It was not the best experience after years of Amiga, but rendering was blazingly fast.

I still use deluxe paint to make sprites, very nice timeless interface

leileilol wrote on 2024-02-21, 05:51:

I still use Paint Shop Pro 5 not out of this 'nostalgia' thing but it's a fast-loading still-practical useful image program that has a comfortable way to work with palettes and alpha channels. It's more out of habit and not desiring bloat than "rember good old day". Only real issue is a weird selection-related memory leak and the imprecise smudge tools. And unlike Photoshop, the company doesn't gaslight you as an illegal old-versions-user for not exclusively keeping up with their live service. 😀

Paint Shop Pro 4 had a major interface change that had shrunk the toolbars, 3's had painting tools and resembled closer to Zsoft PC Paintbrush for Windows.

NeoPaint's also had a Windows version but it never grew out of its 1994 limitations and tools (and rolled that way until NeoSoft sold out around 2018)

Here a heavy user of paint shop pro 7, i use for personal and professional work everyday

I found vital imagemagick to convert whatever new format i get from users to a psp7 readable one, specially png with alpha, that psp suffer a lot to read

I had picked up preowned licenses for Photoshop 4 and 5 at some point and stuck with them for forever. I've since switched to GIMP, but looking at the further evolution of PS I don't see any features added since then that look like I would need them. i.e. I consider those versions feature complete. And they work entirely offline, which is nice. The UI might not have aged well though.

Anybody remember Corel Draw? I never did much with it but the memory of it stuck with me to this day, mostly because I remember it being weird. Maybe that just was child me trying to wrap my head around vector graphics for the first time, dunno. I might need to dig that back out and give it another try.

I remember using ms paint and zooming in so far to do pixel art or modify existing pictures

The first mouse I got in the very early 90's came with a paint program called Splash. I spend hours dicking around with that.

REMOVED

Also, The Draw. I used this to draw ansi text screens for my dail up bbs.

REMOVED

What about Microangelo

I can barely remember using some graphics program for DOS. I thought it was Harvard Graphics, but then I looked through some ancient files salvaged from MFM drives and found I have a copy of HG 2.1. Looks different from what I remember. Maybe a different version. There was also a drawing program for 8-bit Atari that came on cartridge. I think it was basically a blank screen, devoid of toolbars, where you could draw in 4 colors.

Win 3.x Paintbrush was notable for letting you move the cursor with the arrow keys, instead of having to struggle to reach the desired position with cruddy old mechanical mouse. Although Win 95 paint had the advantage of being able to load a 256-color image and save it again without jumbling the palette. At the time I was trying to use these to make sprites for games but pretty soon I gave up and made my own gfx editor.

I like PSP 7. It's so fast on modern machines. But I also own 2022 and it certainly has a lot of useful additions.

I barely did anything graphics related in DOS. In Windows 3.1 I remember using Aldus Photostyler occasionally.

Fantavision

It was a vector animation program released for DOS back in the 80s. The demo animations included a jumping table lamp that reminds me of the Pixar lamp.

Graphics Workshop, abbreviated GWS, DOS and windows versions, that was one I used a bit.

AutoSketch 2 (DOS), Autodesk Animator (DOS), GEM Paint (GEM), Paintbrush (Win 3.1, NT 3.1, OS/2), Super Gameboy/Mario Paint (SNES)..

Edit: MS Pain(t) on Win9x, too.
It was also being used by pixel artists for a long time, or so I heard.

Another program that comes to mind is PShop CS 2 (Mac OS X Jaguar). It's now vintage, too. Still like it, it had such a tidy GUI.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-21, 17:55:

Graphics Workshop, abbreviated GWS, DOS and windows versions, that was one I used a bit.

My dad had this one, too. It (Win version) was on the hard disk on his 386DX-40 PC.
Next to the Kodak PhotoCD Access Software.

theelf wrote on 2024-02-21, 07:51:

I found vital imagemagick to convert whatever new format i get from users to a psp7 readable one, specially png with alpha, that psp suffer a lot to read

I have a batch script that scans my image library at regular intervals auto-converting all JP2, WEBP and AVIF files to PNG.

(It also renames JPE, JPG_LARGE, and JFJF files to regular JPG)

The only problem is that imagemagick makes a mess of animated WEBP files. I need to find out how to force it to leave these alone.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-02-22, 09:14:

GEM Paint (GEM)

Nearly forgot about that one! I remember GEM was the first OS (or I guess, OS interface) ever using on a PC. And I do remember GEM Paint.

I should re-install that one of these days. 😀

Not strictly a "graphic" program but a lot of fun to play around with was FRACTINT - please give that one a try if you dont know it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint

Well, these are my picks:

• Print Master (the original, CGA, almost no printers to choose from): A novelty program that let you print one sheet banners, probably the first graphics program that I used on a PC. For a nostalgic overdose, I recommend using it with a dot matrix printer. Two things to note (when running it on DOSBox-X): when using dot-matrix printers, this program has an option to make multiple passes... but the output is garbage unless you DEACTIVATE IT; also it seems that the paper size is ALWAYS letter, but in my country we use A4. Later versions aren't as iconic (the art scales better and it doesn't look like a bunch of BIG pixels) and has more printers to choose from (PCL and PS printers are available, so you can print on modern printers).
• Banner Mania: Another novelty program, that can print banners across multiple pages. Although the choosings are more limited (mostly only text with some warp/distortions), it can be fun when you use continuos paper. Also, it supports COLOR. So, please, somebody use your dot-matrix colour printer to print a banner across continuous paper and make a video so everybody could see it.
• Draw Assistant: When I started with PCs, I had to learn the IBM Assistant series. I'm still looking for a spanish version of it to download. This program has nothing special about it... but it was the first I used to draw on PC.
• Dr. Halo: Not as bad as Draw Assistant, not as good as DeLuxe Paint. But it was bundled with many mouses, so you could find it everywhere. For a more nostalgic feeling, use it with one of those "Mouse Pen" things.
• MS Paint: Probably the first program everybody ran in Windows 3.1 and 95. Enough said. Not enough said... it's still very useful to save and/or crop screenshots before pasting in documents. Every OS should have a fast, minimalistic image editor included. It's a shame that Microsoft killed it on newer Windows.
• Grips Studio: An obscure, simple, easy to use, vector graphics editor for Windows 3.x. Also very useful to make banners because it bundled some good looking TTF fonts and comic style cliparts. I still have installed it on my Windows 3.1.
• Paint Shop Pro 3.x/4.x: Often looked as a poor man's Photoshop, but always was a better choice for home users. Fast, simpler to use and with less memory requirements. Now that Windows 3.1 is only used for nostalgic purposes, it should the natural choice for image editing.

Some bonus tracks... not so nostalgic but notable for me:

• Corel Draw 4.0: Everybody should know this one, and it's crazy to think of those tools with nostalgic value... but in this case the thing was the CD and not the program. Corel Draw used about 40 megs of the CD... the rest was filled with fonts and quality cliparts, so you ended having hundreds of vector cliparts to use. Also, it could ran on Windows 3.x.
• Aldus PhotoStyler: The first image editing program I used... to paste a teacher head on "another" body. It used to be an alternative to Photoshop.
• Corel Print House 1.x: Although there are still releases of Print Mater, this could be the Windows 9x succesor to it. Many projects, many resources to use.
• WordArt: And last, but not least... a program that should not considered a neither "graphic" nor "program". An add-on to Microsoft Office, it was used and over-used to make front pages to almost every document conceivable. Even "serious" powerpoints still includes texts made with this tool. I guess this is the "comic sans" of graphic tools.

And honorable mentions to Micrografx and Kai's tools. The first one was a company that had nice and simpler alternatives for many graphic tools (diagrams, vector, photo editing, desktop publishing) and even some unique ones (Micrografx Simply 3D), but was bought by Corel and dissapeared. The second one was known by their "unique" interfaces... but note that "unique" doesn't directly translates to "useful" or "better". I didn't like that concept, but I must say that it's gold for nostalgic purposes.